Everyone's got alien fever—and not the kind that turns the veins in your face black and makes you vomit and die. Recently, the idea of banding together to storm Area 51 to finally meet the aliens housed there has taken hold on the brave and the bored alike. The plan was hatched by a Facebook event scheduled for September 20 and nearly two million people agreed to it.
And today is the day! People (not two million of them, though) are actually in the desert near Area 51.
Luckily, we don't actually need to storm Area 51 because video games have already done it. Repeatedly! Not to mention, loads of new games have been slapped together based on the Storm Area 51 event. Here's everything we know about storming Area 51 without having to actually do it ourselves, as predicted by video games.
We might not find aliens in there
I know, I know. The idea of storming Area 51 and not actually finding aliens sounds ridiculous! But there is a very, very slim chance that there are no aliens in Area 51 at all. It's possible that super intelligent alien beings may never have flown an impossibly advanced spacecraft across the entire universe, then suddenly forgot how the brakes worked and crashed in New Mexico back in 1947. It's also possible (though highly unlikely!) that after 70 solid years of people constantly yelling about how there are definitely aliens at Area 51, the government may have relocated them to, I don't know, literally anywhere else. Far-fetched, yes! But it's possible.
This weird, silly theory that you can stroll into Area 51 and not find aliens is held up by GTA: San Andreas. CJ gets a mission to Area 69, which is based on Area 51. (Fun fact: the '69' isn't just a random number! It's a reference to a sex act in which partners perform oral sex on each other simultaneously. Oh, Rockstar.)
After CJ breaks into Area 69, all he finds is a jetpack. Not that jetpacks aren't cool! They're just not alien cool. There are several PA announcements that reference alien bodies and spacecrafts, but we never see them in the game. So don't be surprised if storming Area 51 doesn't result in finding space travelers—and if there is a jetpack, all 1.9 million of us gonna have to figure out how to share it.
If there are aliens, they're not gonna be the cuddly type
There have been several games about Area 51, most notably, Area 51. The 2005 FPS is based on the 1995 arcade light-gun game Area 51, and was followed up by 2007's Blacksite: Area 51. In all of those games, the aliens aren't super happy to meet us.
In the 2005 version, an alien ship crashed in Roswell and that alien was voiced by Marilyn Manson. As you might guess, Alien Manson teams up with the Illuminati to create a mutant virus to dominate the planet. A bored-sounding David Duchovny (to be fair, 'bored' is his default setting) invades Area 51 to stop them, and sort of fails. There's a lot of shooting of both humans and aliens, not a warm and fuzzy meet-and-greet.
It's going to be overly expensive and shut down early
Storming Area 51 is going to cost way more than it should and it's going to end before we're ready. I'm basing this prophecy on our review of the Alienware Area 51m gaming laptop, which cost nearly $5,000 when we looked at it back in May (it has since dropped to around 2 grand). The battery life also wasn't great, lasting less than three hours, so expect an early end to the festivities.
"Powerful as it is, the Area-51m still gets hot and loud—not that it particularly matters since it's much too heavy to put on your lap—and its battery life sucks," our review states. "2 hours and 52 minutes of downstreamed video is nothing for a 90 watt-hour battery that needs two comically sized power bricks to charge."
Be prepared for alien corpses, a teleporter to the moon, floating apples, and zombies
If you think storming Area 51 is just about finding aliens, you're wrong. That's just one of the wonderful features it has to offer. There's lots of other great reasons to visit, like finding an apple hovering in some sort of futuristic electromagnetic field, or finding a teleporter that will take you to the moon, or being attacked by wave after wave of zombies.
That's what Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 3 tells us, anyway, and there's really no reason to doubt either of them. No worries, there are still aliens to be found. They're dead and under sheets, but they're still perfectly available for a great insta story.
If you're Superman, don't come along
This is specifically for people who are Superman, so if you're not Superman, please skip to the next entry. As for you, Superman, you might not want to storm Area 51 with the rest of us because that's where the government keeps all its kryptonite, that glowing green rock that turns you into a weak, sweaty little weenie.
This information comes from DC Universe Online, where Martian Manhunter alerts everyone to Brainiac's plan of invading Area 51 to acquire the kryptonite supply. And you (Superman) probably don't want to help us break into Area 51 only to get inside and then flop to the ground all helpless and trembling while two million people stand around staring at you, right? So maybe sit this one out.
Get ready to do a lot of corner peeking
If I were going to raid a classified military installation, I'd probably bring a few Arma players along. Yes, it would take absolutely forever, because they'd be creeping along corner peeking for, like, hours. If you have an entire afternoon to kill, for example, you can watch a squad invade a modded Area 51 and fight a bunch of aliens in the video above.
Slow, yes. But better safe than sorry. And in addition to Area 51 mods, Arma 3 players will have an official alien-related expansion coming out, coincidentally, July 25.
Wear sunblock because we might get nuked
In Deus Ex, the Illuminati is cancelled but there's something worse: Majestic 12. They claim Area 51 as their headquarters and use it to develop new technologies—turns out the aliens in Area 51 didn't crash land there, they were actually created by Majestic 12 using the DNA of different creatures including, possibly, cows.
Without getting into all the reasons why, a guy named JC Denton isn't a huge fan of Majestic 12 and its leader, Bob Page, and there's a chance he may decide to just nuke Area 51 to make that perfectly clear. This is precisely why you don't taunt your enemies over the radio, Bob.
It's going to suck
I know invading Area 51 sounds fun, like a big party in the desert with a lot of like-minded, curious, determined people you can hang out with until your internal organs are shredded by the bullets of US soldiers as you try to climb the fence. But it's not going to be as great as it sounds, according to Storm Area 51: September 20th 2019, an Early Access game that arrived on Steam a couple days ago.
Frankly, it's a steaming pile of shit. Sure, it's in Early Access, but it's hard to imagine this crappy game getting any better. You just clomp awkwardly around a dull map finding aliens and then leading them to an unconvincing flying saucer while brain-dead soldiers shoot in random directions and other NPCs yell things and Naruto run around uselessly.
Trust me, if storming Area 51 is gonna be anything like this game, just stay home.
